The singlePlace model for creating marketplaces
In the early years of the 2000s, there was a programming forum called Experts Exchange. Their model was simple and obvious: They hosted answers to common programming questions, and you had to pay to read them. A subscription cost three hundred dollars per year.
Joel worked with his cofounder, programmer Jeff Atwood, to come up with a different approach: make the questions visible, make the answers visible, and pay for the whole thing with job advertising. After all, what better place to find great programmers than a website where great programmers come to ask questions and give answers? quotes from this is Marketing by seth godin
As you can see StackOverflow has made free what Experts Exchange was buying. Stackoverflow can benefit from high advertising revenues because developers tend to be big technical content readers and high click rate persons. But knows that at least for marketplaces the inverse can be done
The inverse can be true there are a lot of freemium model things done by passionate people that can be aggregated by a devolved startup into on single place and made paid to the benefit of these people producing these things. There was already a lot of blogs reader and writers who were writing for free. Some of these writers were earning ad revenue if their blogs were successful but it was rarely the case. Medium succeeds in grouping all these folks into a single simple platform for them to write and has built a revenue model on top of this platform which is a marketplace in my point of view.
It is still possible to find dispersed people of a common interest producing something valuable consumed online for free and try to group these persons in communities, providing them all tools they need for producing the output of their interest. If you also can bring all together into this community the ones who consume the output the first, you get an interesting starting point for creating a marketplace. The success of this marketplace will depend on how motivated are the consumers for buying the outputted thing and how frequent this is needed. Etsy has followed the same path by grouping handcrafted in a single place. I am tempted to call this model of business generation model THE SINGLEPLACE model. I have seen many that can be exploited with this model. Look and you can see but now that you will be never be seen until you learn how to see.
